SWP has growing opportunities to spread its ideas today

The French edition of Capitalism’s World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for November. This excerpt is from presentations at regional socialist educational conferences on April 10, 1993, in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the following day at a similar gathering in Des Moines, Iowa. Copyright © 1999 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY JACK BARNES
The Militant has been running an ad for this weekend’s conference entitled “Challenges Facing the Working Class.” That’s fine. But in this talk I want to alter the focus to, “Challenges and Opportunities Facing the Working Class.” I would like to open discussion here on the proposition that communists confront fewer obstacles in spreading revolutionary ideas today — in working together with other working-class and revolutionary-minded fighters who are not yet communists, and distributing communist literature on a wider scale in this country and around the world — than we have faced for decades.

We not only need to see these opportunities in their longer-run context, but to grasp — and accept — the responsibilities they imply. I have had some help in preparing this presentation, since I was fortunate enough to have just spent four days in New York at an international meeting of leaderships of communist leagues from around the world and of youth who are leaders of the Socialist Workers Party. We came to agreement at that meeting that the idea of a “New World Order” — with which global bourgeois opinion was so enamored right after the war against Iraq — is now behind us, and that a pattern of disintegration of the capitalist world order is starting to emerge.

Think about the world we have practiced politics in since late 1987 when panic swept stock markets from New York to Hong Kong. Think about the events that have transpired since then —from the Soviet Union, to China, to South Africa, to Cuba, to Europe (East, West, and Central), and to the United States. It has been a very unusual six years.

The evidence is, however, that the changes that caused the greatest surprises are behind us. That is, we can now better anticipate the character and the broad response of different classes to the world conflicts that are unfolding and will continue to unfold. We can begin to describe — and then analyze — this pattern.

We know what is going to happen with the capitalist economy. Regardless of conjunctural ups and downs, the reality of the opening of a world depression and its deflationary bias will not go away. Cyclical capitalist recoveries, regardless of their duration, will be marked by that deflationary reality. It will mark the assaults on the working class and the increasing economic, and even social, differentiation within our class. And it will mark the character of the contest between the working-class vanguard and the capitalist rulers over how badly our class will be damaged by the workings of the market system before large-scale resistance begins. …

U.S. imperialism will use its weight — be it police power, be it economic coercion, be it grinding pressure on the job, be it threats abroad, be it organizing direct military intervention or precipitating bloody struggles in other countries it pretends to stand above — in order to try to compensate for the disintegration of the stability of an expanding, self-confident capitalist social and economic order. How it does so, and the effects, dominate the patterns of world politics. Economic instability, social dislocation, and political radicalization — right and left: that is what all of us are slowly but surely being pulled into. …

I think the danger we face today, however, is not one of impatience or exaggerated expectations. The danger is being unable to face up to the implications of where the social crisis is headed. The crisis is heading toward the kinds of struggles, toward a shift in the pace of political life, that practically no one in this room has ever seen. It is heading toward battles with the kind of explosive character and violence that are seen only infrequently in the development of class society.

Thinking workers and other fighters sense that a corner has been turned. As pressures from the rising class tensions build, they sense that today’s deepening crisis — at whatever pace it unfolds, and with whatever twists and turns — will not be resolved short of battles in which reactionary forces will be unleashed in the streets against the labor movement and its allies. If communists do not clearly and forthrightly explain what is coming, then the anticipation of these developments can drive us away from the line of march of the working class and even make cowards of us over time, to our belated surprise.

It is often said that great historical crises are always and only resolved in struggle; you do not have to be much of a historian to know that makes sense. But what is not said as often is that the odds in these class struggles — the probability of victory or of loss — are determined long before the battles themselves break out. The odds depend on the self-confidence, political clarity, and previous combat experience of vanguard forces who see the political trends and who are already among the fighters on one side or the other of the class barricades. They depend on the preparations by cadres of disciplined proletarian organizations who know that what they have done beforehand will be decisive when the working class moves toward revolutionary action.

The best example, of course, is the October 1917 revolution in Russia. Prior to the revolution, the Bolsheviks were a relatively small force many of whose leaders, above all V.I. Lenin, had worked for nearly a quarter-century with a very clear idea of the character, inevitability, and depth of the crisis that was coming. Every “legitimate” force — including in the broad left wing of the international socialist labor movement of that day — considered the Bolsheviks to be an irksome minority of extremists doomed to inconsequentiality. But it was the Bolsheviks who were able to lead the workers and peasants in putting an end to the horrors and the bloodshed of World War I, and of capitalist and landlord domination in the tsarist empire.

That kind of political preparation, for those kinds of coming class battles, remains the central task of small communist organizations today.

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